DUBAI: AstraZeneca is creating a separate division for vaccines and antibody therapies, the drugmaker said on Tuesday, to focus on its COVID-19 shot and the development of coronavirus treatments after a series of setbacks during the pandemic.
Reuters reported in July that the Anglo-Swedish company was exploring options for its vaccine business and expected to have greater clarity on the matter by the end of 2021.
The new division, which will be led by executive vice president of Europe and Canada, Iskra Reic, will combine research and development, manufacturing, commercial and medical teams, a company spokesperson said.
“The team will be dedicated to our COVID-19 vaccine, our long-acting antibody combination and our developmental vaccine addressing multiple variants of concern, as well as to our existing portfolio for respiratory viral disease,” the spokesperson said.
The decision to set up a new business comes after a tumultuous 18 months for the drugmaker, which developed its COVID-19 vaccine in conjunction with Oxford University.
Production problems forced the company to cut deliveries to the European Union this year, prompting the bloc to launch a legal challenge. Governments have also restricted its use among certain age groups due to links to rare blood clots and its application for US approval is taking longer than expected.
But positive results from trials of its antibody cocktail as a preventative shot against COVID-19 have given the company a major boost, potentially positioning it as a supplier of both COVID-19 vaccines and treatments.
The creation of the separate vaccines division was first reported by the Financial Times.
The move indicates AstraZeneca sees a future for its COVID-19 shot beyond the pandemic but shouldn’t be taken as a sign it is planning a full-scale entry into the broader vaccine market, Hargreaves Lansdown analyst Nicholas Hyett said.
“That would require significant new research and development investment, and as yet we have no indication that this is forthcoming,” he said.
AstraZeneca has pledged to supply vaccines at cost during the pandemic. The not-for-profit strategy and challenges with the shot fueled speculation about whether it would want to keep the business in the long term.
While AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine remained a drag on profits in the second quarter, sales of the shot more than tripled to $894 million from the first three months of the year, making it one of the company’s best-selling products.
AstraZeneca is due to report third-quarter results on Friday.
AstraZeneca to set up division for vaccines and antibody therapies
https://arab.news/gh72t
AstraZeneca to set up division for vaccines and antibody therapies

- The new division will combine research and development, manufacturing, commercial and medical teams
- The decision to set up a new business comes after a tumultuous 18 months for the drugmaker
UPDATE 3-US probes effort to impersonate White House Chief of Staff, WSJ reports

US federal authorities are investigating an effort to impersonate White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, the Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday, citing people familiar with the matter.
The report said Wiles had told associates that some of her cellphone contacts had been hacked, allowing the impersonator to access private phone numbers.
The incident affected her personal phone, not her government phone, the report said.
The Journal reported that in recent weeks, senators, governors, top US business executives and other figures received messages and calls from a person who claimed to be Wiles, citing the people familiar with the messages.
The White House and FBI did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The White House has struggled with information security. A hacker who breached the communications service used by former Trump national security adviser Mike Waltz earlier this month intercepted messages from a broad swathe of American officials, Reuters reported recently.
And late last year, a White House official said the US believed that an alleged sweeping Chinese cyber espionage campaign known as Salt Typhoon targeted and recorded telephone calls of “very senior” American political figures.
As Wiles is a key Trump lieutenant and a lynchpin of the White House’s operation, the content of her personal phone would be of extraordinary interest to a range of foreign intelligence agencies and other hostile actors.
Wiles has reportedly been targeted by hackers at least once before, in the final months of Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign. At the time, hackers alleged by US authorities to be acting on behalf of Iran approached journalists and a political operative with a variety of messages sent to and from Wiles, some of which were eventually published.
Elon Musk came to Washington wielding a chain saw. He leaves behind upheaval and unmet expectations

- The world’s richest person got a seat at Trump’s table and put $250 million behind his campaign
- He was suddenly everywhere — in Cabinet meetings, sleeping in the White House, or with his young son in the Oval Office
- “They made some changes without really knowing what they were doing... they set themselves up for failure,” says think tank exec
WASHINGTON: Elon Musk arrived in the nation’s capital with the chain saw-wielding swagger of a tech titan who had never met a problem he couldn’t solve with lots of money, long hours or a well-calibrated algorithm.
President Donald Trump was delighted to have the world’s richest person — and a top campaign donor — working in his administration, talking about how he was “a smart guy” who “really cares for our country.”
Musk was suddenly everywhere — holding forth in Cabinet meetings while wearing a “tech support” shirt and black MAGA hat, hoisting his young son on his shoulders in the Oval Office, flying aboard Air Force One, sleeping in the White House. Democrats described the billionaire entrepreneur as Trump’s “co-president,” and senior officials bristled at his imperial approach to overhauling the federal government.
After establishing Tesla as a premier electric automaker, building rockets at SpaceX and reshaping the social media landscape by buying Twitter, Musk was confident that he could bend Washington to his vision.
Now that’s over. Musk said this week that he’s leaving his job as a senior adviser, an announcement that came after he revealed his plan to curtail political donations and he criticized the centerpiece of Trump’s legislative agenda.
It’s a quiet exit after a turbulent entrance, and he’s trailed by upheaval and unmet expectations. Thousands of people were indiscriminately laid off or pushed out — hundreds of whom had to be rehired — and some federal agencies were eviscerated.
But no one has been prosecuted for the fraud that Musk and Trump said was widespread within the government. Musk reduced his target for cutting spending from $2 trillion to $1 trillion to $150 billion, and even that goal may not be reached.
In Silicon Valley, where Musk got his start as a founder of PayPal, his kind of promises are known as vaporware — a product that sounds extraordinary yet never gets shipped to market.
Trump said Thursday on his Truth Social platform that he would hold a press conference Friday with Musk. “This will be his last day, but not really, because he will, always, be with us, helping all the way,” Trump added. “Elon is terrific!”
Musk’s position was always designed to be temporary, and he had previously announced his intention to dedicate more of his time to his companies. But he also told reporters last month that he was willing to work part-time for Trump “indefinitely, as long as the president wants me to do it.”
Musk got a seat at Trump’s table and put $250 million behind his campaign
It was clear that Musk wouldn’t be the typical kind of presidential adviser around the time that he showed the world his belly button.
Racing on stage at a campaign rally one month before the election, he jumped for joy next to Trump, his T-shirt rising to expose his midriff. Musk had already sold Trump on his idea for a Department of Government Efficiency while also putting at least $250 million behind his candidacy.
The plan called for a task force to hunt for waste, fraud and abuse, a timeworn idea with a new twist. Instead of putting together a blue-ribbon panel of government experts, Trump would give his top donor a desk in the White House and what appeared to be carte blanche to make changes.
Musk deployed software engineers who burrowed into sensitive databases, troubling career officials who sometimes chose to resign rather than go along. Trump brushed off concerns about Musk’s lack of experience in public service or conflicts of interest from his billions of dollars in federal contracts.
Their unlikely partnership had the potential for a generational impact on American politics and government. While Musk dictated orders for government departments from his perch in the White House, he was poised to use his wealth to enforce loyalty to the president.
His language was that of catastrophism. Excessive spending was a crisis that could only be solved by drastic measures, Musk claimed, and “if we don’t do this, America will go bankrupt.”
But even though he talked about his work in existential terms, he treated the White House like a playground. He brought his children to a meeting with the Indian prime minister. He let the president turn the driveway into a makeshift Tesla showroom to help boost sales. He installed an oversized screen in his office that he occasionally used to play video games.
Sometimes, Trump invited Musk to sleep over in the Lincoln Bedroom.
“We’ll be on Air Force One, Marine One, and he’ll be like, ‘do you want to stay over?’” Musk told reporters. The president made sure he got some caramel ice cream from the kitchen. “This stuff’s amazing,” Musk said. “I ate a whole tub of it.”

Looking back on his experience in government, he described it as a lark.
“It is funny that we’ve got DOGE,” an acronym that references an online meme featuring a surprised-looking dog from Japan. “How did we get here?”
Musk did not give federal workers the benefit of the doubt
From the beginning, Musk treated federal workers with contempt. At best, they were inefficient; at worst, they were committing fraud.
His team offered them a “fork in the road,” meaning they could get paid to quit. Probationary employees, generally people new on the job without full civil service protection, were shown the door.
Anyone who stayed faced escalating demands, such as what became known as the “five things” emails. Musk wanted every government employee to submit a list of five things they accomplished in the previous week, and he claimed that “failure to respond will be taken as a resignation.”
Some administration officials curtailed the plan, concerned that it could jeopardize security in more sensitive areas of the government, and it eventually faded, an early sign of Musk’s struggle to get traction.
But in the meantime, he continued issuing orders like thunderbolts.
One day in February, Musk posted “CFPB RIP,” plus an emoji of a tombstone. The headquarters of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, created after the Great Recession to protect Americans from fraud and deceptive practices, was shut down and employees were ordered to stop working.
Musk had already started gutting the US Agency for International Development, a pillar of the country’s foreign policy establishment and the world’s largest provider of humanitarian assistance.
“Spent the weekend feeding USAID into a wood chipper,” he bragged.
Thousands of contacts were cut off, pleasing conservatives who disliked the agency’s progressive initiatives on climate change and gay rights.
Musk rejected concerns about the loss of a crucial lifeline for impoverished people around the globe, saying, “no one has died.” However, children who once relied on American assistance perished from malnutrition, and the death toll is expected to increase.
The lawsuits began piling up. Sometimes workers got their jobs back, only to lose them again.
The Food and Drug Administration, which is responsible for ensuring the safety of everything from baby formula to biotech drugs, planned to lay off 3,500 employees. But again and again, the agency was forced to rehire people who were initially deemed expendable, including laboratory scientists, travel bookers and document specialists.
Commissioner Marty Makary, who started his job after many of the cuts took place, told attendees at a recent conference that “it was hard and my job is to make sure we can heal from that.”
Only 1,900 layoffs took place, but another 1,200 staffers took buyouts or early retirement. Experts fear the agency has lost much of its institutional knowledge and expertise in areas like vaccines, tobacco and food.
There are also concerns about safety on public lands. The National Park Service has been bleeding staff, leaving fewer people to maintain trails, clean restrooms and guide visitors. More cuts at the Forest Service could undermine efforts to prevent and fight wildfires.
The Environmental Protection Agency faces a broad overhaul, such as gutting the Office of Research and Development, which was responsible for improving air pollution monitoring and discovering harmful chemicals in drinking water.
Not even low-profile organizations were exempt. Trump ordered the downsizing of the US Institute of Peace, a nonprofit think tank created by Congress, and Musk’s team showed up to carry out his plan. The organizations’ leaders were deposed, then reinstated after a court battle.
Musk made little headway at the top sources of federal spending
The bulk of federal spending goes to health care programs like Medicaid and Medicare, plus Social Security and the military.
Unfortunately for Musk, all of those areas are politically sensitive and generally require congressional approval to make changes.
Thousands of civilian workers were pushed out at the Pentagon, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is reducing the ranks of top generals and looking to consolidate various commands. A plan to downsize an office for testing and evaluating new weapons systems could save $300 million per year. Hegseth recently asked employees to submit one idea per week for cutting waste.

However, the Pentagon budget would increase by $150 billion, for a total of more than $900 billion, under Trump’s spending proposal working its way through Congress. The money includes $25 billion to lay the groundwork for Trump’s “golden dome” missile defense program and $34 billion to expand the naval fleet with more shipbuilding.
Another $45 million is expected to be spent on a military parade on June 14, which is the 250th anniversary of the Army’s founding and Trump’s 79th birthday.
Musk also faced blowback for targeting Social Security, which provides monthly benefits to retirees and some children. He suggested that the popular program was “a Ponzi scheme” and the government could save between $500 billion and $700 billion by tackling waste and fraud.
However, his estimates were inflated. Social Security’s inspector general said there was only $71.8 billion in improper payments over eight years. Nor was there any evidence that millions of dead people were receiving benefits.
Changes to Social Security phone services, pitched as a way to eliminate opportunities for fraud, were walked back after an outcry from lawmakers and beneficiaries. But the agency could still shed 7,000 workers while closing some of its offices.
Musk’s popularity cratered even though Americans often agreed with his premise that the federal government is bloated and wasteful, according to polling from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.
Just 33 percent of US adults had a favorable view of Musk in April, down from 41 percent in December. In addition, 65 percent said Musk had too much influence over the federal government.
Musk talked of staggering savings but delivered modest results
During a campaign rally in October, Musk said he could find “at least $2 trillion” in spending cuts. In January, before Trump was inaugurated, he revised by saying, “if we try for $2 trillion, we’ve got a good shot at getting one.”
But in April, at a Cabinet meeting, Musk provided a different target. He was “excited to announce” that they could reach $150 billion in savings during the current fiscal year.
Whether that figure proves to be accurate is difficult to measure, especially because DOGE routinely inflated or mischaracterized its work. But it falls short of President Bill Clinton’s initiative three decades ago, which resulted in $136 billion in savings — the equivalent of more than $240 billion today.
Elaine Kamarck, a key figure in the Clinton administration, said they focused on making the government more responsive and updating antiquated internal procedures. The work took years.
“We went about it methodically, department by department,” she said. The effort also reduced the federal workforce by more than 400,000 employees.
However, Musk did little to seek insight from people who knew the inner workings of government.
“They made some changes without really knowing what they were doing,” said Alex Nowrasteh, vice president for economic and social policy studies for the libertarian think tank Cato Institute. He said there were “a lot of unforced errors.”
In the end, Nowrasteh said, “they set themselves up for failure.”
Trump’s big plans on trade and more run up against laws of political gravity, separation of powers

- he laws of political gravity, the separation of powers and geopolitical realities are proving to be tougher to conquer than Trump will publicly admit
WASHINGTON: Once again, President Donald Trump’s biggest policy plans were stopped in their tracks.
On Wednesday, an obscure but powerful court in New York rejected the legal foundation of Trump’s most sweeping tariffs, finding that Trump could not use a 1977 law to declare a national emergency on trade imbalances and fentanyl smuggling to justify a series of import taxes that have unsettled the world. Reordering the global economy by executive fiat was an unconstitutional end-run around Congress’ powers, the three-judge panel of Trump, Obama and Reagan appointees ruled in a scathing rebuke of Trump’s action.
The setbacks fit a broader pattern for a president who has advanced an extraordinarily expansive view of executive power. Federal courts have called out the lack of due process in some of Trump’s deportation efforts. His proposed income tax cuts, now working their way through Congress, are so costly that some of them can’t be made permanent, as Trump had wished. His efforts to humble Harvard University and cut the federal workforce have encountered legal obstacles. And he’s running up against reality as his pledges to quickly end the wars in Ukraine and Gaza have turned into slogs.
The laws of political gravity, the separation of powers and geopolitical realities are proving to be tougher to conquer than Trump will publicly admit. As various legal skirmishes play out, he may have to choose between bowing to the limits of his power or trying to ignore the judicial system.
“If the latter, we may have a constitutional crisis,” said University of Texas history professor H.W. Brands.
After a second federal court on Thursday found Trump’s tariffs to be improper, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said the Trump administration expects to prevail in its judicial appeals but also indicated that officials are exploring other laws to implement tariffs. A federal appeals court said Thursday the government can continue to collect the tariffs under the emergency powers law for now as the Trump administration challenges the ruling, though the government could be obligated to refund the money if the ruling is upheld.
Kevin Hassett, director of the White House National Economic Council, said there are two baseball caps in the room behind the Oval Office that say “Trump Always Wins” and Trump has been “right” about everything.
“Trump does always win these negotiations because we’re right,” Hassett said on Fox Business Network’s “Mornings with Maria.” “These activist judges are trying to slow down something right in the middle of really important negotiations.”
Part of Trump’s challenge lies in the nature of the job, in which only the thorniest of problems cross his desk. But there’s also the fact that Trump’s keen instincts for what plays well on TV don’t necessarily help with the nitty-gritty of policy details.
By unilaterally ordering tariffs, deportations and other actions through the White House, Trump is bypassing both Congress and the broader public, which could have given more popular legitimacy to his policy choices, said Princeton University history professor Julian Zelizer.
“The president is trying to achieve his goals outside normal legal processes and without focusing on public buy-in,” Zelizer said. “The problem is that we do have a constitutional system and there are many things a president can’t do. The courts are simply saying no. The reality is that many of his boldest decisions stand on an incredibly fragile foundation.”
As Trump sees it, his tariffs would solve genuine problems. His “Liberation Day” taxes on imports would close persistent trade imbalances with other countries, with his 10 percent baseline tariff providing a stream of revenue to help offset the trillions of dollars in federal borrowing that would be created by his planned income tax cuts.
But when the financial markets panicked and the interest charged on US debt shot up, Trump backtracked and ratcheted down many of his tariffs to 10 percent while negotiations began to take place.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent suggested this had been the plan all along to force new trade negotiations. But Trump shortly undercut him by saying on the White House South Lawn that he backed down because the financial markets were getting “yippy” — a reminder that Trump’s own improvizatory and disruptive style can upend any working policy process.
Trump still has tariffs in place on autos, steel and aluminum. Those are tied to the premise that imports would create national security risks based on previous investigations under Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962. He could use other laws to start new investigations or temporarily impose tariffs, but the White House is more focused at the moment on challenging the court rulings.
“What is unprecedented is Trump asserting authority under a 1977 statute that had never been used for tariffs, not just for targeted tariffs, but the largest tariffs since the 1930s,” said Peter Harrell, a fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who served in the Biden White House. “That’s what is unprecedented and unusual.”
Harrell said Trump could re-create many of his tariffs using other laws but “it would require more work and be a much more orderly process.”
Rice University history professor Douglas Brinkley said Trump’s sense of the presidency relies on a deep misreading of the office. He mistakenly assumes that the tariffs used in the 19th century to fund a much smaller federal government would now be able to pay for a much larger federal government. But he also assumes that power flows to and from him, rather than from institutions and the rule of law.
“He doesn’t seem to realize that anytime he doesn’t listen to the court orders that he’s making an anti-American statement,” Brinkley said. “It’s telling people that I’m bigger than the American Constitution, that judges are just errand boys for me.”
The Trump White House blamed its latest setback on the US Court of International Trade.
White House trade adviser Peter Navarro said in a Bloomberg News interview that the judicial branch was part of the problem, keeping Trump from delivering on his promises.
“We’ve got courts in this country who are basically engaged in attacks on the American people,” Navarro said. “The president ran on stopping the fentanyl poisoning, stopping international trade unfair practices from stealing our factories and jobs. And courts keep getting in the way of that.”
White House acknowledges problems in RFK Jr.’s ‘Make America Healthy Again’ report

- Kennedy has repeatedly said he would bring “radical transparency” and “gold-standard” science to the public health agencies
WASHINGTON: The White House will fix errors in a much-anticipated federal government report spearheaded by US Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., which decried America’s food supply, pesticides and prescription drugs.
Kennedy’s wide-ranging “Make America Healthy Again” report, released last week, cited hundreds of studies, but a closer look by the news organization NOTUS found that some of those studies did not actually exist.
Asked about the report’s problems, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said the report will be updated.
“I understand there was some formatting issues with the MAHA report that are being addressed and the report will be updated.” Leavitt told reporters during her briefing. “But it does not negate the substance of the report, which, as you know, is one of the most transformative health reports that has ever been released by the federal government.
Kennedy has repeatedly said he would bring “radical transparency” and “gold-standard” science to the public health agencies. But the secretary refused to release details about who authored the 72-page report, which calls for increased scrutiny of the childhood vaccine schedule and describes the nation’s children as overmedicated and undernourished.
Leavitt said that the White House has “complete confidence” in Kennedy.
“Minor citation and formatting errors have been corrected,” HHS Spokesman Andrew Nixon said in an emailed statement. He described the report as a “historic and transformative assessment by the federal government to understand the chronic disease epidemic afflicting our nation’s children.”
NOTUS reported Thursday that seven of the more than 500 studies cited in the report did not appear to have ever been published. An author of one study confirmed that while she conducted research on the topics of anxiety in children, she never authored the report listed. Some studies were also misinterpreted in the MAHA report. The problematic citations were on topics around children’s screen time, medication use and anxiety.
Kennedy’s MAHA report had already been stoking concerns among Trump loyalists, including farmers who criticized how the report characterized the chemicals sprayed on US crops.
The report is supposed to be used to develop policy recommendations that will be released later this year. The White House has requested a $500 million boost in funding from Congress for Kennedy’s MAHA initiative.
US-China tariff talks ‘a bit stalled,’ needs Trump, Xi input, Bessent says

US trade talks with China are “a bit stalled” and getting a deal over the finish line will likely need the direct involvement of President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said on Thursday.
Two weeks after breakthrough negotiations led by Bessent that resulted in a temporary truce in the trade war between the world’s two biggest economies, Bessent told Fox News that progress since then has been slow, but said he expects more talks in the next few weeks.
“I believe we may at some point have a call between the president and party Chair Xi,” Bessent said.
“Given the magnitude of the talks, given the complexity ... this is going to require both leaders to weigh in with each other,” he said. “They have a good relationship, and I am confident that the Chinese will come to the table when President Trump makes his preferences known.”
The US-China agreement to dial back triple-digit tariffs for 90 days prompted a massive relief rally in global stocks. But it did nothing to address the underlying reasons for Trump’s tariffs on Chinese goods, mainly longstanding US complaints about China’s state-dominated, export-driven economic model, leaving those issues for future talks.
Since the mid-May deal, the Trump administration has concentrated on tariff negotiations with other major trading partners, including India, Japan and the European Union. Trump last week threatened 50 percent tariffs on EU goods, only to delay that threat.
A US trade court on Wednesday
ruled that Trump overstepped his authority in imposing the bulk of his tariffs on imports from China and other countries under an emergency powers act. But less than 24 hours later, a federal appeals court reinstated the tariffs, saying it was pausing the trade court ruling to consider the government’s appeal. The appeals court ordered the plaintiffs to respond by June 5 and the administration to respond by June 9.
Bessent said earlier that some trading partners, including Japan, were negotiating in good faith and that he detected no changes in their postures as a result of the trade court ruling. Bessent said he would meet with a Japanese delegation on Friday in Washington.